Sound for Chicken Run

Sound For Chicken Run Chicken Run ruffled some feathers in the cinema, while now the DVD is worth a sticky-beak. Julian Mitchell talked to the sound team behind this egg-straordinary claymation feature. f you are a fan of Aardman Animation’s short films you will know that they are masterpieces of their type. However, traditionally an Aardman film was always a short film as opposed to feature length. But that all changed with Chicken Run, a 79-minute clay animation feature film which took four years to bring to celluloid. One of the reasons for the jump to thIe film format was a five-film deal with DreamWorks, the newest Hollywood major headed by the powerful threesome of Jeffrey Katzenburg, Steven Spielberg, and David Geffen. The deal gave the team real financial security. In fact, the two sets that were used for shorts like The Wrong Trousers quickly grew into the 30 sets that littered outbuildings around Aardman’s Bristol- based studios in England’s west. Chicken Run was the first of these five films and so became highly signif- icant – not just as cement for this new Anglo-America relationship, but also as a test for this type of animation, which takes huge commitment and patience, not to mention time. The hype in Hollywood for this film was enormous – DreamWorks even took the unprecedented step of hijacking the traditional Disney Summer release date of June 23 to show the depth of their backing. Not bad for a studio that started out with a children’s show plastacine character called Morph... I think anyone over the age of 25 remembers Morph! Vocal Beginnings The production of an animated film is always an upside-down event because of the length of time it takes to animate. Aardman was pushing out about a minute of film per week, at the peak of Chicken Run’s production. But before one piece of plastecine was bent into action the animators needed a lead from the audio department. James Mather, the only Aardman employee on the audio post- production team, described the start of such a process: “The first thing we did was to assemble actors and have a ‘scratch’ recording session around a couple of microphones. We needed to get a feeling for the script, to make sure the dialogue worked. We found that there were certain jokes that didn’t work and jokes that were so close to others that they ruined them. Also, some characters became overbearing when they weren’t supposed to be; bit parts in some cases had lead part values. The next three months were spent re-writing different character’s lines or debating whether a character should be there at all.” It was at this stage that Aardman had help from DreamWorks with the script, to ‘finesse it’, as they say in Tinseltown. This scratch recording was then slowly joined by an animated storyboard, which is basically a collec- tion of frames from the drawn storyboard. These frames were then loaded into an Avid, cut and sync’ed to the audio. “This is, I think, an American system called a story-reel where they cut together all the black and white storyboard pictures and edit it as they would edit the film. Even though they don’t move, it’s then called an animatic. So you’ve got the whole story in black and white stills at a pace 42 that they hope will be representative. To make that work enhance the flow and then the sound team has to find a we had to tracklay footsteps, tracklay whoosh-bangs, sound for them. There were occasions when maybe there tracklay music, anything that we could do sound-wise to was a crowd scene and the dialogue editor would notice get that flow going. You could tell pretty much from that a chicken at the back move its mouth as if to say where there were lulls, where there would be an edit something, because the animator felt that the moment problem. For instance, there’s a big chase scene in the warranted it. There were other times when a chicken film that in storyreel version was about eight minutes might be spotted just banging his head against a wall long, we cut that down to four minutes because we knew and, again, a sound had to match it. we couldn’t sustain it no matter how many effects and “The animators are very aware of the sounds they want. music cues you put in. So from the first story-reel If they’re animating day-in and day-out, in their mind they assembly we started putting sound effects on. are running through an idea of what they want it to sound “By that point they are getting a general feel of pace like. It was odd that in some cases the Foleys we put on and how the shots are working. You have to understand matched the pace of the animation when it came in that the decisions made here are of vital importance, because we both understood the pace of the scene. You because every minute that you keep in is a week’s work. have to build up a relationship with the animators so they From that point there is a lull while the storyboard takes are comfortable animating and know you will understand shape, and then we start recording the key characters what they mean and use the right sound.” properly so that they can ‘dope sheet’ – that’s where they That relationship was stretched even further on mark out the frames against the dialogue so they can Chicken Run because the directors, Nick Park and Peter start animating.” Lord, were still on the picture when the pre-mixing had The voiceovers kept coming back for recording, mainly finished. The final mixing started when they turned up. because of this dope-sheeting process, which is so So unfortunately, the mixing did take longer than usual essential to the animation. You can’t dope sheet to a because they were hearing some of the mixes for the scratch actor because the lead would then have to do a first time actually on the dubbing stage. kind of ADR to the clay animation, which wouldn’t work, mainly because the animators take so much of their Fowl Sounds characterisation from the character of the voice. The The sound design for an animated feature is more leads will also come back several times throughout the important than for a standard film because it helps the animating as new pick-up lines are introduced. viewers suspend their disbelief, and certain sounds The physical recording of some of the voices was far become associated with certain characters. The sound from ideal: Mel Gibson and Julia Sawalha only ever met effects quotient for these films is incredibly high, as is the once to record together and that was in Canada where effects mix on the dubbing stage. For films like Chicken Mel was filming. All the other takes with Mel were wild Run the danger for the sound designer is to make the tracks, either in a Californian studio or down an ISDN effects too comical or too unbelievable; playing it straight line from London or Bristol. has already reaped Aardman many rewards. Adrian Rhodes, a director of De Lane Lea in London Do Chickens Have Lips? where most of the sound work was done, was sound The Wallace and Gromit shorts are known for their lack designer and dubbing mixer on Nick Park’s previous of dialogue and heavy use of sound effects to bring the Wallace and Gromit films, but for Chicken Run he did the animation alive. Chicken Run needed the same injection final mix only. His choice for sound designer was of effects but also had reams of dialogue to contend Graham Headicar, winner of the UK’s BAFTA award for with. James, who started acting as the main dialogue sound for the last three years. Graham is also part-owner editor when the animation started coming back, was of De Lane Lea after setting up a sound company called initially concerned that there was too much dialogue: “I was worried that it might be overkill, but it actually worked. You don’t feel overawed by it. We re-recorded all the background chickens and they filled out and gave the track size. All the character dialogue after that seemed to be right. You don’t feel that there is too much, even though there are hundreds of chickens here, not just the eight that you are following.” James was actually editing the whole track – the dialogue, music, and effects – while the story reel was taking place, with the help of some freelance editors. When the animation started coming back the jobs were split off because of the intensity of the work. Also, when the animation started coming back they would notice that there was animation without any allocated sound. Apparently this is the way of animators: they will insert bits of action that they feel The Chicken Run sound team at De Lane Lea Studios, London. 43 guttural sounds, like some kind of devil dog. I was really geeing it up when the bloke said he would let it out. So there I was with a 30-foot boom, recording this dog on the other end. He did actually get the mic a couple of times. The dogs that you hear in the film are actually those dogs and they aren’t pitched down or anything to sound more vicious.

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